I'm having trouble with the internets....

[vix]

Just thought I would post here in case anyone can shed any light on this.

Unfortunately I can't give people the url as it's a seekrit forum, but the general gist of it is suddenly I can't access a certain url from home. I've tried all 3 computers and get the same problem.

The link is in my favourites, and when I click on it, it takes ages to load, the little words at the bottom left that tell you when the internet is doing (probably a proper term for this) say 'looking up www.blahblah.co.uk' and eventually it will go to the 'site not found' page.

This happens in FF and IE.

I've just realised it also does the same for Pheebs Kettle of Fish site :/

I've checked with other forum users who are on Plusnet but they have no issues. I've deleted cookies and stuff but that had no effect - didn't think it would as it's on 3 computers.

I'm not using the wrong url as I access it from my faves but also tried typing it in and still get the same result. The site isn't down as I can access it from work.

Can anyone throw ideas at me as to what else to do?

[Dymetrie]

Restart your modem and/or router?

[Jonny69]

I couldn't access the pulse-jets.com forum from home for years until we moved. Tried everything and asked everyone. Something to do with IP banning or something but even using a proxy didn't help.

[vix]

I've always been able to access this certain forum until recently too :/

Router restart didn't help. :(

[kaiowas]

I'm getting some idea what's going on but I'm not clued up enough on how these things work to know who's fault it is and what can be done.

Essentially I'm pretty sure it's a DNS issue. Any attempt to ping or tracert affected domains causes timeouts. I've now found a few domains that are affected, all are hosted on Beansprouts hosting and DNS lookups tell me that they share the same name servers (ns1.vidahost.com and ns2.vidahost.com)

Best I've come up with is that for whatever reason whatever server at plusnet is handling our DNS requests is unable to get IPs from Beansprouts name servers. Whether this is due to a fault at plusnets end or Beansprouts end is hard to tell as no-one else seems to be suffering from this issue. All I can think is that for some reason our IP might have been blacklisted somewhere but then I'd expect to be getting some sort of permission denied error rather than things timing out.

Anyone got any good ideas?

[Burble]

If there are DNS problems you could bypass them to some extent as long as you know the IP address for the site - use something like www.dnsstuff.com to find that.

Armed with that information, open up the 'hosts' file in a text editor (Notepad for example) which is in windows/system32/drivers/etc and add an entry consistent with the localhost entry that is already there, ie, ip.address <tab> www.seekritforum.com

Save and close the file then try again. What that does is tell the computer that it doesn't need to bother doing a DNS lookup or www.seekritforum.com

It is highly unlikely to be a DNS issue caused by the DNS server blocking your IP, since it won't be your IP connecting to the vidahost.com DNS servers.

[kaiowas]

Think I've got to the bottom of it. A while back plusnet changed the IPs of their dns servers and I kept using the old ones because they were still working and I could always remember the IPs when I needed them which was easier than looking up the new ones all the time.

Seems the time has come when the old DNS servers aren't doing their job properly, changed some settings on the router and all appears to be well.

[Feek]

That's why I use Open DNS servers with my own as a backup.

Glad it's sorted :)

[Richard Slater]

Another vote for Open DNS - http://www.opendns.com/welcome/

[Beansprout]

Glad all is sorted :) :)

Especially since my DNS is running fine ;) :D

[Mark]

I'm starting to use PN as primary with OpenDNS as a backup.

Hoping I'm not using the aforementioned old DNS servers, though Beansprout's stuff works for me so I'm probably not.